Raising Awareness/Twinkle Twinkle

If I had to boil down the job description of a teacher to one brief statement it would probably be: to raise awareness in others. I can think of two recent examples which will help to explain what I mean.

One student I have was learning the song Blackbird by the Beatles. It was a song he had already learnt long ago with another teacher well before he was ready to play it. He thought it would be a breeze to learn because he’d already learnt it before. He already knew where to place his fingers for the most part and the basic structure of the song. This was perfect because it allowed me to focus from the beginning on awareness, not having to deal with issues of notes and rhythm and memorization, and helped me isolate the concept with the student. He needed to become more aware of tempo, of the sound of his attack, the consistency of his right hand to pluck the notes and his left hand to apply the exact right amount of pressure. He needed to become more aware of all the things that made the recorded song sound so good and to hear the difference between what he was doing and what Paul McCartney was doing. Otherwise he could never fix it.

But what I really want to point out in terms of awareness is the following experience. I had taught this student a small portion of the song that he had forgotten where it modulated to G Dorian. Not that he knows what that means but that’s alright. The story of how to grow patience as a teacher for what must be told to a student you know you’re going to have for a long time is another story. Anyhow, before teaching the boy the section in question I asked him to sit at his computer and see if he could figure it out by ear. I gave him many clues. I told him only to listen to the lower note and that he could play it entirely on the A string. But he could not here the note. He could literally not distinguish the sound of the lowest note on the guitar from the rest of the sounds that were happening on the recording. He couldn’t isolate the low guitar note from the vocals. So I taught him the line and he played it a few times and then I made him listen again. And still he could not here the line even once he know what he was listening for. So this is what awareness is. One way to help someone make leaps in awareness is to let them return to something they thought they understood after a period where they had not thought about it for a long time and then show them what they had missed the first time, assuming that you as a teacher are aware of something that they were not. Once they see that they missed something, they are open to further suggestions. The shock of realizing that they had failed to understand something that they thought they were sure of beforehand is often a very useful tool to gain the trust of a student and help them evolve.

There is an eight year old girl I started teaching a few months ago. She is a very energetic and positive child and she was taking up guitar after giving up a few other instruments. So I sit down with this young lady who has not had good experiences with music teachers and who wants to be entertained and who has no preconceptions about what is cool or interesting or childish in regards to guitar playing. She can’t hold the guitar straight. It sits flat on her lap with the sound hole facing up. But she can sing a note back to me that I play and she is very enthusiastic.

I’d like to point out to anybody teaching a student how much about her I had sized up within the span of 2 minutes. The guitar kept slipping down, chords were out of the question, good attitude, no musical knowledge, relatively strong but completely untrained ear, no technical ease whatsoever. I walked in without a lesson plan, noticed these qualities, and then reacted instinctively. I think this is a strong way to approach any private lesson.

So we played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on the high E string. It took two weeks to learn. I never wrote anything down, never told her the names of any notes, never asked her to hold her guitar upright. I only asked her to remember what I showed her. And I did show her using visual information. It was enough for her to be able to look at my hand and discern what fret I was playing and then to confirm what her eyes taught her with the confirmation of the sound of the note.

Next came Happy Birthday. Although we played in a different key, still on the E string but in A major instead of E major, there was only one note different and for the most part all the notes were the same as in the other song. I tried to explain this to her but she obviously didn’t understand so I let it drop. Where progress was being made was in the fact that this song contains larger leaps, forcing her to increase her spatial awareness of the fretboard and the fact that it was a longer song and therefore a greater test of memory. This song took almost a month to learn and still there were no note names, no chords, no scales, only the sounds and her gradual and mostly unconscious heightening of awareness and development of a methodology to figure out the sounds. I was allowing her to look at my hand less and forcing her to use her ear to find the sound and her own brain to discover where it was located on the guitar. It was slow and to many people perhaps she could have learned it better or faster. They might also say of many of my students that their comprehension of theory is surprisingly limited considering my own obsession. But I would say that to train a horse the best way you have to let it learn at its own pace and come to you when it feels ready. And so it also is with guitar players. And when they are ready they excel because they have been taught how to think for themselves, how to solve a problem, how to use their ear, how to be confident.

The third song was the Itsy Bitsy Spider. In some respects an easier song, but still tricky. For people starting to learn how to listen and recognize notes, repeated notes are very hard to recognize. They sing the song with the words in their head and hear and feel slight differences in intonation and imagine that the note has changed when in fact it didn’t or only did so very slightly but they were fooled by their perception. So this was a good exercise for the recognition of repeated notes. More importantly, since it was easier and shorter than Happy Birthday, it allowed for this young student to learn the notes almost entirely by ear and to memorize it with noticeably more ease. Still there was no concept of a scale, no names for notes, only a relationship developing with the sounds and their relative location on the neck of the guitar on a single string. But was that entirely true?

We are now about two months into lessons and it is time to learn Oh Canada. But first, this young student had to learn what a scale was. She learned very fast. All I had to do was play it for her once and she played it back to me perfectly. It was clear that our two months of building fundamentals, even if she still didn’t even hold the guitar properly, which I was about to finally address as well, had payed off. Then I had her sing the scale degrees while she played the scale. Then I had her go back and play the Itsy Bitsy Spider and Twinkle Twinkle while also singing the song in scale degrees at the same time. And then I sung to her our Canadian National Anthem in scale degrees and she played it back to me perfectly and had no trouble remembering it. And because I had waited for the right moment I was able to do all of this in a half hour. And this little girl was able to feel as if she discovered the scale and therefore understood it and appreciated it on a level which many adults I meet don’t necessarily possess, let alone 8 year old girls. Undoubtedly when I return she will be worse off then that during our one extremely lucid session. But we will build back up to that moment where she caught sight of all that she was unaware of and then surpass it many times over on the way to the next breaking of the dam of her awareness.